Highlights from the Biddable World Conference - Part 2

Biddable World was a very full day – too full to fit into one blog post! We’ve already told you what happened in the morning – so here we (Holly and Tamsin) are with even more tips and Key Takeaway Messages (KTM) from the afternoon’s talks.

Jim presented to us the role of images in display advertising, and gave us the simile of the day: like dressing up as the Village People for a black-tie event, image ads can stick out – but just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

Beauty vs beast images – try pictures of ugly things as well as good looking things.

Jim likes direct buys as there are fewer restrictions. For example, it allows you to use non-standard ad sizes, which are less likely to be removed by ad blockers. But it’s best to do a small test buy first.

KTM: Identify what goals you are trying to achieve and only implement images if they are going to help you reach those goals.

View Through Conversions (VTC) are a measure of a customer viewing your ad, but not clicking on the ad before converting. Some customers might see, but not click on your ad; if this customer later converts, this metric will attribute them as a view-through conversion.

Nathan presented us with a firm case in support of accountability. We need to understand the conversion path so that we can make solid attributions. Previously, the reliance has been on the ‘last click’ of a conversion journey; however, VTCs are becoming more important as they give us more information about user behaviour.

Viewing an ad is important due to the ‘mere exposure bias’ – if you’re familiar with something you become positively biased towards it. Nate cited a study that said that repeat exposure to an ad, even if you don’t consciously look at it, will lead to a more favourable reaction and will also increase perceptual fluency, which is the ability to identify a brand. Time spent on page and average order value, are both shown to increase with mere exposure to an advert.

VTCs are exactly what PR, TV, print and outdoor ads would like to report on. However, the effects are harder to identify and to quantify.

It is hard to identify the uplift from VTCs, but not impossible. Nate tried to identify it for one client by running a display campaign for a few weeks and looking for correlation between VTCs in that period with non-display CTR.

You can also test the uplift from display ads by running a non-branded ad (e.g. one for a charity) alongside your actual ads – only the actual ads should have VTCs.

KTM: View Through Conversions are an uplift metric. They aren’t for everyone but everyone should assess them.

Have a brief form for your clients to get the main info you need: objective, goals, what success looks like.

Think about tagging early on. It may take time to get tags onto your website.

Separate new users from old ones with remarketing, and split remarketing campaigns by recency of visit. John has found visitors are most valuable on the same day as their visit, or over 30 days after their last visit (when they behave more like new visitors).

John recommends using CPM bidding. CPC and CPA bidding is available, but everything will be turned into a CPM bid when it gets to auction, so CPM bidding is more transparent.

On creatives: “Simple is good. Engaging is better. Rubbish is bad.”

Once you’ve built your campaign, test it. Go live slowly – only activate some campaigns, or use lower bids – to make sure everything works.

1. Audience and device fragmentation will only increase. There will be more use of mobile and second screening. 50% of users will have tablets by 2015.
2. Flow advertising will emerge: following a user between TV and search, or between devices.
3. Marketing silos will continue to disappear – for example, Facebook needs both social and biddable teams to collaborate.
4. Native advertising won’t scale very well.
5. Mobile advertising will get better.
6. Content marketing will go mainstream – see Red Bull as an example. There’ll be more content marketing about the ethos of companies, as consumers are becoming more interested in this.
7. Corporate marketers will embrace networked innovations.
8. The cookie won’t die.
9. Marketers will get comfy with their CTO and CIOs.
10. Video will “explode”.

Nandita gave us an excellent presentation stressing the importance of knowing your market in terms of cultural and local knowledge so that you have all the resources to fully optimise your campaigns.

Ecommerce is growing at a rate of 18% and is becoming more prevalent in Latin America and Asia.

Nandita argues that you need a cultural understanding of your market in order to understand localised buying behaviour. Get insights from people with local knowledge as well as from audience profiling.

Do research. For example, if you were going to sell gifts in Korea look for studies on Korean gift giving, rather than just sticking to campaigns around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, etc.

We can identify our users’ digital footprints and personas by researching that market.

Your company’s brand values will be set in the culture of its original country. Make sure you use values that are global. While humour is globally valued, it is difficult to translate the same joke, so be careful!

KTM: We need to know our market in terms of localised culture, so that we can build personas and target that market correctly.

Ali talked about the importance of knowing the revenue and ROI your PPC has made.

If you’re not ecommerce, Analytics will only tell you a number of conversions. You could estimate the revenue based on an average value, but the actual value will be variable. For example, from Ali’s previous work in the automotive industry, searches for ‘Mazda garage’ got more conversions (i.e. calls) than ‘Mazda dealer’, but it turned out that the calls for ‘garage’ were less valuable and calls for ‘dealer’ led to higher revenue.

Google now has Universal Analytics, which allows you to enter offline data. You can enter revenue data for your leads, and use custom dimensions and metrics to say what product they were interested in.

This will change remarketing. Previously, you couldn’t distinguish between callers, but soon you’ll be able to exclude callers who actually bought something, or remarket specifically to people who called but didn’t buy.

KTM: If you use AdWords to drive leads or calls, look into Universal Analytics so you can attribute revenue properly.

14. Dr. Wing Yee Ling – Navigating the Maze of Google Bid Adjustment

Since enhanced campaigns rolled out last July, we’ve had to think about bid adjustments as well as just bids. Dr Wing went through two methods to find the right mobile bid adjustment:

To calculate your bid adjustments you could use RPC – set your mobile bid so that the desktop to mobile ratio for bid is the same as the ratio for RPC.

You could use ROI for the calculation. Work out the mobile bid based on the mobile ROI, then find the percentage change from your desktop bid.

ROI based bids should get better ROI, but this method is more calculation heavy, and you have to keep track of CPC fluctuation. The RPC method is more stable as RPC changes less over time.

Both of these assume the bid to CPC ratio is the same.

When you have keyword level bids you shouldn’t use a straight average to get the ad group level adjustment; use an average weighted by impressions.

Remember that if you want to change desktop bids while keeping mobile the same, you have to change two things – the bid and the bid adjustment.

Note that if you want to use adjustments based on time, different devices may vary differently – mobile traffic will peak at a different time to desktop traffic.

KTM: Think carefully about how to set your bid adjustments, depending on how stable you want them to be, and remember that using many adjustments leads to convoluted bids.

So that’s it for the first Biddable World! Do you agree with the speakers? Is Nick Christian right to focus on volume of traffic and ignore quality score? Has Nate Wood persuaded you to pay attention to your view through conversions? Will Martyn Bentley’s predictions come true? Let us know in the comments.